Crash
by dropdeadred
Summary: Just a little something
1. Default Chapter

DISCLAIMER: I don't own them, and I never will. In fact, I don't even want the characters in this story...  


***  
  
My breath rattles in my lungs, and I wince with the pain that the deep breath has caused me. I make one more stretching, futile grasp for the tricorder that remains stubbornly just beyond my reach, and this time the pain causes me to cry out into the dimness of the crashed shuttle. I know that guttering sound, and I realise I do not need a tricorder to tell me what is wrong. I have broken ribs and a punctured lung, and more than likely a concussion if the throbbing in my head is anything to go by. I am having trouble feeling my legs, they are tingling, which I suppose is a good sign, but at this moment in time I am having trouble looking on the bright side. It is difficult to think at all beyond the pain at my ribs and the dead weight of - something - pressing down on my hips. Difficult to think.... what happened.... why did we crash? Where are we? We? Who was I with?  
"Chakotay?" I croak into the darkness, my throat dry and hot. It's hot in here. The core hasn't breached, or I wouldn't be here now, but if environmental controls are down then it's going to get a whole lot hotter.  
"Chakotay?!" I repeat. I want to shout your name, but it hurts too much. Still I have no answer. Where the hell are you? You were there right next to me when.... my eyes slam shut at the broken flashes of images that suddenly come to me. Inertial dampers went offline, we took a battering... an ion storm... I try to chase away the vision of you being thrown against the ceiling of the shuttle like a ragdoll, as if you weighed nothing, but it stays with me. A great wave of despair races through me and I fight it, I fight it as hard as I can. What will I do if you die? Somehow I am trying to chastise myself for thinking like this, telling myself this is weak and pointless, but the possibilities are too real: the pain I feel is real, the blood dripping into my eyes is real, and the silence answering my calls is all too real. 

What will I do? I'll go on as before, I'll shore myself up and I'll carry on, I tell myself. But the resolution rings hollowly inside my mind. Yesterday I felt so strong, but now it is all I can do to fight the despair that I have been incredibly stupid. We had taken the flight in silence, we'd just had a row. Which I'd won, or so it seemed at the time. What a pathetic victory that seems now. It had all started on my last birthday, when you'd blindfolded me, against my better judgement, and taken me to the holodeck where you'd written a beautiful new program for me, of my Indiana. We'd sat beneath the stars and they seemed so big, so close, and we drank real wine. And later we lay side by side on the blanket, the grass was sticking in me and I was ready to go back to my quarters, but then you leaned over and kissed me, and you tasted of wine and you were so warm and I was so relaxed by the wine.... I knew you'd want more but I thought we could deal with that later, and I only felt a little guilty when you came to an emotional, shattering orgasm, and I cried out with you, not wanting you to be alone. 

You didn't speak to me for days, I remember, but then you came to me, pale and tired. I felt strong that day, the confusion and fear at what I'd done melted away. You agreed with everything I said, you prostrated yourself before me, said you'd accept whatever I was able to give you, no matter how little. I blink back stinging tears as I think of you, forlorn, sitting on my couch while I dictated terms to you from the viewport. You just nodded slowly. I didn't see it then, but by god I see it now. I would come to you, I said, or we would not come together at all, they were my terms. I thought them sensible, easy, simple.... who did I think I was? I thought I could prevent a regression into love and needing. We would be there for one another physically, help one another out, but there would be no complications, none of that blurring of boundaries that I was so afraid of. And I thought you felt the same, after all you agreed to it all. But lying here now in the dark, quiet shuttle, I realise how badly I need you to be alive, how badly I need you. I realised months ago that I had it horribly wrong. All wrong, it was all disgustingly wrong. I went to you that night, and you welcomed me into your bed. You didn't suspect anything was different, didn't see me unable to squeeze the tears back and bite my lip from telling you I loved you. Could you tell that the emotion was real that time? Did you believe me? 

I was always taught to be nice. That's one of the things my mother would insist, that if nothing else I should just be nice to people. Was I nice to you Chakotay? I think not. It began to destroy me, taking what should have been sacred between us and turning it into a quick fix, using it as a way to escape from what was between us, while we should have used it to cement us together forever. A sob races up my gullet and the intake of air sets the pulsing pain off again under my ribs, but I am perversely glad of it. The mental image of you afraid to kiss me after we...finished...is wiped from my mind. And then I can't stop myself, not even the pain will stop me this time, I am sobbing, loud, like a child. I release wail after wail into the hot darkness, but the liberation is short-lived. I cannot release the hate I feel towards myself for the way I acted, cannot undo the stupid things I said and did, cannot tell you now.... My sobs fade to whimpers, and I think I might never stop. Is this my penance? To know I have been so utterly wrong, I Kathryn Janeway the infallible, have been the stupidest woman ever to have breathed? It is humbling but useless to me, for I am beginning to believe that I will die here, and all that will be left is a few personal logs for people to wonder over and be astonished. 

I suck in a breath, try to stop my laboured breathing, the pain is threatening to make me black out. Kathryn. My vision becomes hazy, and the dimness seems to be getting dimmer. Kathryn. This is such torture, I almost hear you. I try to hold my breath, see if I can suppress the pain. I take one deep breath and hold it... And in that silence I hear you.  
"Kathryn!" Your voice is weak.  
"Chakotay!" Your name explodes from my lips, and I am weeping again. "Chakotay, where are you?" I am crying.  
"I'm.... I don't know," Is that an edge of humour in your voice? It stems my tears. "Please don't cry Kathryn."  
"I thought-" my shaky voice trails off.  
"I know." 

And I think you do. 

  
~FIN~ 

This story now has a companion/sequel : Burn


	2. Burn

  
This is a sequel to Crash  
DISCLAIMER: Again, don't own them, never will.  


***  
"Hold still please Commander!"  
The doctor's tone is exasperated, and I can't blame him, but whoever said that dermal regenerators were painless needs to have one pointed at the side of their head for ten minutes. I wince again and instinctively shy away, the doctor grits his teeth and takes me by the jaw holding my head still. I wish he would turn down the lights. It is too bright in here, especially after being in pitch blackness for almost seven hours, and I feel like I am under the proverbial spotlight. In my peripheral vision I can see you casting furtive glances my way and it is all I can do not to grin from ear to ear, but I am in no position to anger the doctor right now.... 

I remember lying in that shuttle, lucid just after the crash, before I succumbed to the encroaching concussed oblivion, and not caring either way if it were to become my coffin. I hadn't realised I was so depressed, I was just tired as far as I knew. Immensely tired. I was tired not with you, although you were a big part of it, but I was tired of myself. I was disgusted with what we had become, but I could not say no. I tried desperately to find something beautiful, something worthy in what we were doing but I just ended up feeling more pathetic. And the worst thing was that although we had become closer, physically, than ever before, we were drifting further apart, steadily, day by day. At times it was as if I didn't know the woman in my bed, and it was always my bed. I kept to my part of the bargain and waited for you. Sometimes you came and sometimes you didn't. If it weren't for how I felt, those times when I was convinced you were coming, and then you didn't, if it weren't for how it made me feel, I could have convinced myself that I was playing the game as well as you. 

And I thought you were, I honestly thought that you were happy with the arrangements. They were your idea, who was I to argue? If I'd just had that little bit more backbone where you were concerned this may not have gone on as long as it did, and we both may have emerged a little less jaded, a little less ashamed. But my days of arguing with you were long gone, or at least my drive to. There were times when I'd love to argue with you, catch some of that fire, but I didn't want to any more. Didn't want to see that which had drawn me to you in the first place, a moth to his death. If only I'd seen it, I'd think. And then yesterday we had that fight. I can't even remember what it was about, but I remember you. I remember you, eyes like flint, I thought you might impale me with your glare. Your hair seemed redder, your skin paler, and I caught a glimpse of the woman warrior you once were. I remember I blanched, unable to argue any longer, the strength of mind sapped from me. And I saw you crowing to yourself, just an arrogant edge on your smile, self-satisfaction in your eyes. And then I did as you told me. 

But then came the trouble in the shuttle. At first when the storm struck I was glad of something to do. The silence had become stifling and I was afraid I might accede to keep the peace, but when we began losing altitude and the inertial dampers failed, and I realised we were in trouble, I shocked myself by being ambivalent. I worked the controls calmly and when all hell broke loose I just gave in. The next thing I remember is being woken up by you crying. At first when you called my name I didn't answer, I wanted you to think I was dead, I wanted to be dead. But then I heard something in your voice that jarred me. Your calls became quieter, weaker, until you were barely whispering, and then you suddenly started sobbing. I'd never even seen you cry before, and I didn't quite know what to do. It sounded alien to me; I'd just spent the last months convincing myself that you actually had no heart, and yet here you were sobbing, weeping my absence - I could hardly believe it - so hard you made my eyes fill up too. How could I go on trying to hate you - and trying was as far as I got, I could never hate you Kathryn - when here was all the evidence I needed that you were in as much pain as I? 

Some part of me, a deeply injured, scarred part of me railed against the idea and choked back my voice even as I wanted to call out to you that I was here and always would be. I struggled with myself, past injustices wrestled with present truths, the all too human preoccupation with self-preservation came up against my self-professed bond to you. And, I like to think, the real me won out. And I called out to you. Kathryn. You didn't hear me, and I tried again louder, loud as I could from my smoke-burned lungs.  
"Please don't cry Kathryn." All I wanted to do was make you stop, I wanted to rush to you and hold you close and make you forget the past six months, but I could no sooner have moved than I could have spirited us both out of there.  
"I thought you were-"  
"I know." I cut off your words before they came. I know what you thought and I heard what it did to you. Awful as it may be, it took the sickening suggestion of a death to shake us both to our senses. I knew, just from those few minutes listening to you, that we had both allowed ourselves to become the victims of our own fears. I also knew, that I wasn't going to let it continue a moment longer. What that meant, I didn't quite know, but whatever it was it couldn't be worse than that which we had already been going through. 

I squint again, partly at sickbay's bright lights, and partly at the moisture in my eyes. The doctor sighs but finally releases my jaw. For a hologram that man has a grip like iron.  
"A visit from both of you, must be my luck day," he says, droll. "This should help with the headache," he says, pressing a hypo to my neck and then crossing to administer to you. "But I want you both here overnight, and restricted to light duty for at least ten days."  
I steal a glance your way. You are sitting up, legs dangling over the side of the biobed, and you are carefully studying the floor.   
"What?" the doctor says, "No smart remarks? No pithy comebacks?"  
You raise your head and send him scuttling into his office, then you turn your eyes to me. They immediately soften and you sigh. My heart goes pitter-pat as you slide off the bed and float over to me. I can't trust myself to speak as you lay a hand on my chest and smile shyly, your eyes just a little too bright. I smile back and see you choke down a gentle sob, but it's too late, the tears escape your eyes and your face contorts. It's too much, I push myself up and wrap my arms around you. You throw yourself into the embrace, gripping me tightly. I try to hush you, but it seems to be the day for tears because it's not long before I join you.  
"I'm sorry!" We both speak at the same time, then laugh weakly. I lean back and tip your face up, I need to look into those eyes. And I find I am drowning. You gulp noisily, trying to stop crying and I need to kiss you. I bend to press my lips to yours and you relax just a little. I close my eyes and give in to that dizzying stupor that I haven't felt for so long. I feel your hand on my thigh, your fingers digging in as you gasp and part your lips to mine. I feel your hand at my cheek, you seem afraid to touch me, but only for a moment. We both shudder and break the kiss. I reach out to tuck a stray lock of hair behind your ear and we lean into one another, out foreheads just touching. You slump against the biobed, and I suddenly feel the tiredness upon me like a lead weight. I move a little on the tall bed, and turn you and tug you and somehow manage to get you up there with me. I pull you close, your back to me, and wrap myself around you. You clasp my hands in your own and kiss my fingers. I kiss the back of your head and tighten my grip on you, I don't ever want to let you go. I smile as I have a vision of the doctor trying to pry us apart in the morning.  
"Chakotay?"  
"Yes?" The lights go down at last, it seems to doctor has at least some idea.  
"We can work this out can't we?"  
"We can do anything." And I feel you grow heavy in my arms, and your breathing slows and I can feel your heartbeat under my hands. I am already dreaming about you, and wonder if you feel anywhere near as happy as I do right now. And you lift my hand to your lips and kiss the knuckles and smile against it. 

And I think you do. 

  
~FIN~ 


End file.
